Re: Libraries and repositories

[Pixel <address@hidden>]

Tim Hickey <tim@cs.brandeis.edu> writes:

> It seems that the standard libaries aspect of successful languages might
> be made moot if there was an efficient way of accessing the Java libraries
> in a language independent way. Something like the C#/.net approach but
> with platform independence. Conceptually, languages and libraries seem
> somewhat orthogonal.

I've been fighting against this idea on LtU (http://lambda.weblogs.com/).
To be more precise, we must devide libraries in 2 categories:

(1) the basic library including manipulating strings / numbers / lists /
dictionnaries / IO

(2) the extension library (a la CPAN) which can be more or less independant of
the language. In fact i think it's true if the library interface is designed
to be language independant.

IMO (1) is not orthogonal with the language. It depends from a lot of features
a language has or not (closures / static-checking / operator-overloading / OO
/ type-based-overloading / generics). Syntax/sugar is very important for (1).

Python/Ruby/Perl will not win anything from using Java's strings/lists library
which is much poorer.

For (2), the functionalities are complex enough and not used often enough, so
that a tight integration is not needed. For (2) i truly agree with you 
(but note we've already been doing this for years with libraries in C).

http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$2188?mode=day
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$1642?mode=day


PS: if someone can proove me wrong, please do :)